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Welcome to the common place, where Elise & Vicky discuss and dissect books, words, and life in general.

What’s a commonplace book?

A commonplace book is a collection of knowledge. It is a journal filled with everything from quotations, observations, and citations to formulas, facts, and figures–anything that’s worth remembering from anything one has read, heard, or seen. In a way it is a scrapbook, commemorating and keeping track of the things we have learned and the places we have been, figuratively or literally, via the media that passes through our lives: books, articles, poems, movies, songs, blogs, and so on. Commonplace books are kept by readers, writers, scholars, and students of schools and of life.